David Nobes on the World Summit on the Information Society and the failure of some of its visionaries to see beyond tame and regimented applications of the Internet.
Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.
Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media.
David Nobes on the World Summit on the Information Society and the failure of some of its visionaries to see beyond tame and regimented applications of the Internet.
This paper describes a system we have implemented that enables people to share structured in-place annotations attached to material in arbitrary documents on the WWW. The basic conceptual decisions are laid out, and a prototypical example of the client-server interaction is given. We then explain the usage perspective, describe our experience with using the system, and discuss other experimental usages of our prototype implementation, such as collaborative filtering, seals of approval, and value-added trails. We show how this is a specific instantiation of a more general "virtual document" architecture in which, with the help of light-weight distributed meta information, viewed documents can incorporate material that is dynamically integrated from multiple distributed sources. Development of that architecture is part of a larger project on Digital Libraries that we are engaged in.
(Source: Authors' abstract)
Presented at 1995 World Wide Web Conference.
The original proposal for CERN on which the World Wide Web is based.
"Cloud Computing" is a rather foggy notion, according to which the World Wide Web will be increasingly seen as a platform where not only information, but also different kinds of services and applications will become immediately available, as if coming out of an undifferentiated, nebular space. People will rely less on the software installed on their personal computers, and more on whatever is usable online.